Tej

Padmavyuh: One Door is a voice-driven retelling of the Mahabharata, set in a parallel universe where Abhimanyu, the sixteen-year-old who in the original epic died trapped in the Padmavyuh formation, gets one chance to be saved. You play Arjuna. Three voices call from the maze at every gate. Only one is Krishna's; the others are deceivers wearing his cadence. The mechanic is audio: you walk Arjuna toward the diya whose voice you trust. Get it wrong twice, and the maze closes. Subhadra waits at the gate; she has already grieved this boy once, and cannot grieve him twice. The problem it explores: most "voice AI" demos use voice as a layer, which is a narration over a game that would still work without it. Padmavyuh asks what happens when audio is the gameplay. You can't see your son. You can only hear three voices, one of which is the divine guide and two of which are the maze pretending to be him. Listening becomes the act of the game. ElevenLabs use: I used four ElevenLabs APIs in concert. Voice Design generated six custom Indian-English personas like Krishna (steady, philosophical), Narrator (formal, grave, Mahabharata-scroll cadence), Abhimanyu (younger, wounded), Subhadra (warm, breaking), and two Deceivers (one urgent and panicked, one seductively reasonable). Text-to-Speech rendered every line with per-character voice_settings (stability, style, similarity_boost). Krishna's settings stay rock-stable across all three gates because he is divine and constant; the deceivers' settings destabilise progressively gate-by-gate, where gate 3 deceivers have the lowest stability and highest style; so the maze itself sonically unravels as Arjuna gets closer. Music API pre-generated three tension beds (Dawn - Indian classical raga; Battlefield - distant war drums; Chamber - sustained tanpura drone) that crossfade between scenes. Sound Effects API generated the conch-shell horn at gate openings, a single bowstring pluck on wrong choices, layered arrow ambience during voice playback, and Subhadra's exhale on the closing "Beta." Each diya plays with stereo panning via Web Audio's createStereoPanner, so direction matters as much as content. Zed use: every code change, such as game logic, audio integration, character animation, spawn-opposite logic, the Subhadra arrival timing fix, the lives system, and visual feedback effects, was prompted to Claude inside Zed's Agent panel.

Submitted 30 Apr 2026